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While you might own every single release your favourite band has put out, nothing beats going to see them live. If that's something you do regularly, you know that you'll not only have to fight it out with any number of like-minded fans to get your ticket, but you'll also have to run the gauntlet of booking via one of the major ticketing providers, which often includes submitting captchas, paying any number of booking fees or printing fees and running the risk that you won't come away with what you actually wanted.

I stopped playing Battlefield this year. Why did I stop playing the massively popular first-person shooter? Because it never works when it launches. For those who haven't experienced the promise and defeat of a Battlefield launch, it goes as such:

A multiplayer beta precedes the launch, often by a slim few months, which is chalked up to server testing.

Players enjoy the beta, which is sometimes buggy, but often stable enough. And hey, it's a beta.

The game launches; millions of players splash into online servers; and it becomes unplayable for days, weeks and often months at a time.

Battlefield games come out every year. This was not always the case, but in the past four years, we've seen three Battlefield games. Zero of those three worked at launch (I actually wrote about this back when Battlefield 3 came out, at our sister site Joystiq). Battlefield 4 launched last October; it just started operating consistently. At E3 2014, EA announced this year's entry in the series: Battlefield Hardline. It's with this tremendous amount of baggage that I approached our interview with Battlefield studio head Karl Magnus Troedsson.

Remember that Mirror's Edge sequel DICE showed off at last year's E3? Yeah, well we're no closer to an actual release date for the title, but the studio did show off some more rendered footage at Electronic Arts' press event. The focus this time around is on the all-new move set the team's built into Faith, the game's protagonist. DICE consulted with actual parkour artists to include a new range of controls tied into actual combat. DICE also promised there'll be more in the way of player involvement with the story and a focus on the who and why behind Faith and the other "runners" occupying the game's world. We've got the full trailer, so head on past the break to check it out.

Sweden-based developer DICE -- best known for the Battlefield series -- is making Star Wars: Battlefront. Working closely with Lucasfilm, the game launches in spring 2015. Sadly, that's about all that EA and DICE had to say. You can check out the trailer from today's media briefing today after the break.

Video games and movies crib ideas from each other quite a bit these days, but seeing Electronic Arts go back and save some of its fallen comrades is a bit unexpected. The outfit's announced that in the wake of GameSpy's back-end multiplayer tech going dark, it's transitioning three Battlefield games to different servers so they can (virtually) live to fight another day. Which ones specifically? Battlefield 2142, Battlefield 2 and the superbBattlefield Bad Company 2. AsIGN notes, though, plenty of EA's games that are listed are annual sequels and may not see the same treatment. However, this shows signs that GameSpy's closure won't kill everything under its umbrella. We've reached out to EA for confirmation and a statement about why these three games were picked over others, and will update this post should we hear back. In the meantime, if you feel like celebrating, we recommend a few rounds of squad rush on "Port Valdez" -- it's good for the soul.

Harmonix is charting new territory yet again. The studio that birthed both Guitar Hero and Rock Band, and the only third-party game-development house that created a successful Kinect franchise (Dance Central), announced a new game today: Chroma. Unlike the studio's last several games, Chroma is headed exclusively to the PC (via Steam) as a free-to-play title. Also unlike Harmonix's last several games, Chroma is wildly experimental, blending first-person shooting with pulsing electronic beats and garish visuals. The music game studio is even working with an outside team, Hidden Path Entertainment: the same folks behind critically acclaimed shooter Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.

If you're still wondering what type of game Chroma is at this point, that's understandable: There's no such thing as a music-based first-person shooter. That is not a thing that exists (well, unless you wanna count Midway's terribly amazing Revolution X). So let's break it down: In Chroma, you play one of five classes (standard FPS fare, from basic assault to heavy "tank"), with weapons and abilities varying based on the class you choose. In the two game modes we played at DICE 2014, we were on a team with other writers battling for control of various points within a level or battling for control of a cart being pushed one way or another (think: Team Fortress 2). Pretty normal shooter stuff so far, right?

The musical wrinkle comes into play whenever you shoot or jump. Fire a sniper rifle shot on the downbeat and connect? That's a one-hit kill. Jump on the downbeat? You'll go a little higher. Better yet, jump on a downbeat on a jump pad and chain your button presses to the beat to continuously jump from pad to pad (this all makes more sense in Chroma's stylized future-world setting, promise). You can fire most guns whenever you want, and jump at any time, but timing actions to the beat makes a world of difference. That is Chroma's bizarre, fascinating premise.%Gallery-slideshow180328%

PlayStation 3 exclusive The Last of Us was the most successful game of 2013. That's not just sales (it sold extremely well, to the tune of 3.4 million in its first three weeks), but also critical reception (an average Metacritic score of 95/100 and it swept game of the year awards across the game industry in 2013). Last week, The Last of Us earned development studio Naughty Dog a whopping 10 wins at the annual DICE awards show in Las Vegas -- considered the Oscars of gaming.

With Naughty Dog's past creating hit franchises like Crash Bandicoot, Jak & Daxter and Uncharted, The Last of Us leads Neil Druckmann and Bruce Straley aren't strangers to success (these guys led development of Uncharted 2, another extremely successful game). Their latest work is a tremendous departure.

Keiji Inafune's been making games for nearly 30 years. He's the man behind one of gaming's most iconic characters (Mega Man) and several huge franchises (Dead Rising, Onimusha). After 23 years working at Capcom, one of Japan's largest game publishers, he suddenly quit back in 2010. "Settling down means death for a creator. As long as you are a creator, you cannot settle down," he announced on his blog. Just six months after being appointed Capcom's Global Head of Production (overseeing the company's entire gaming catalog, from Resident Evil to Street Fighter), he quit.

With that, he set off on his own and created two new companies: Comcept and Intercept. When we talked with Inafune last week at DICE 2014, he spoke of his plans for Comcept in detail. "I was a publisher for 20 years, so you'd be right in thinking I brought some ideas from there into Comcept," he said. That means, first and foremost, retaining ownership of IP. That's a major component of going with Kickstarter for the latest Comcept game, a Mega Man-esque action game titled Mighty No. 9.

The project sailed past its target goal of $900K and took in $3.8 million. Without a publisher, of course.

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capcomcomceptdicedice2014hdpostcrossinterviewkeiji inafunekeijiinafunemega manmegamanvideoTue, 11 Feb 2014 16:42:00 -050021|20824621http://massively.joystiq.com/2013/12/13/storyboard-dont-fight-with-random/?utm_medium=feed&utm_source=Feed_Classic&utm_campaign=Massively&ncid=rss_semi
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Most of my Storyboard columns center on larger issues, providing advice in some way. This one does not. This one is purely about one of the elements of roleplaying in MMOs that I particularly dislike: using in-game random rolls to determine the outcome of actions during tense scenes (or out-of-game rolls in games that don't support /random or /roll or something similar).

This is a time-honored practice in MMOs, but I've never had many nice things to say about it, to the point that I wrote an entire column about dueling without even discussing it. In practice, it makes sense, casting otherwise unresolvable situations back to the realm of tabletop gaming. What's not to like?

Lots of things. Resolving conflicts with random dice rolls is unsatisfying and to be avoided at all costs. And if you want to compare it to tabletop gaming, you're making a lot of logical leaps that don't hold up under scrutiny.

If you've wanted to immerse your body in a first-person shooter, you've typically had to use a complex simulator. Battlefield 4 may soon provide a decidedly simpler (and cheaper) alternative. DICE's Patrick Bach has revealed to Xbox Wire that the game may use the Xbox One's Kinect sensor for head-tracking look controls, such as leaning around a corner. Voice commands might also be available, Bach says. There's no guarantees that BF4 will get the new input methods, but DICE may have competition as an incentive. Infinity Ward recently hinted to Official Xbox Magazine that Call of Duty: Ghosts could use Kinect for more than navigating menus, so there's a chance that at least one of the two games will have motion control in the future.

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battlefield4diceeagamingkinectmicrosoftMotionControlVideoGamesVoiceControlxboxoneWed, 18 Sep 2013 15:44:00 -040021|20723721http://massively.joystiq.com/2013/09/11/ccp-adds-owen-obrien-to-eve-valkyrie-roster/?utm_medium=feed&utm_source=Feed_Classic&utm_campaign=Massively&ncid=rss_semi
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EVE: Valkyrie, set for release in 2014, utilizes virtual reality to give players the sense of being a real pilot in an EVE Online spaceship. On his appointment to this new position, O'Brien said:

"The opportunity to work with a focused, talented and passionate team at the forefront of game-changing technology is a dream scenario for me. But it's not just about the technology. This was a project born out of a genuine passion for gaming, and that shows in what the team has already achieved."

After a year's wait, DICE+ is finally shipping its Bluetooth game die. The chance cube is available for $40 in the US, and €40 ($53) in many other parts of the world. While the selection of compatible Android and iPad games is limited to a handful of party and strategy titles, the developer kit should lead to more releases in the future. If you're eager to modernize your board game experience, you can buy the digital dice from DICE+ itself through the source link.

In holiday 2011, while fans of both the Call of Duty and Battlefield series were gearing up for virtual war, the publishers behind each megafranchise were gearing up for a different type of virtual war. With the launch of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Activision's in-game social network -- dubbed "Call of Duty Elite" -- went live. Just prior, alongside the launch of competing title Battlefield 3, EA introduced its "Battlelog" system. And thus began a parallel virtual war for fans' loyalty, battled via user numbers and engagement metrics. It's a pretty boring war, but its armaments are the games many of us know and love.

The first-person-shooter social network war continues to this day (in silence, of course), with EA recently stepping up its rhetoric surrounding this October's entry, Battlefield 4. Since E3, where some new Battlelog features were shown for the first time during EA's presser, the company's released its first big Battlelog marketing video (seen below). But we wanted more details about what the first next-gen version of Battlelog will look like, and what EA's DICE studio has been able to accomplish with new hardware.

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battlefield4battlelogdiceeaelectronicartshdpostcrossjespernielsenpcplaystation3playstation4xbox360xboxoneMon, 05 Aug 2013 14:03:00 -040021|20686702http://massively.joystiq.com/2013/07/02/ccp-taps-ea-s-sean-decker-as-new-vp-of-product-development/?utm_medium=feed&utm_source=Feed_Classic&utm_campaign=Massively&ncid=rss_semi
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Big changes from Iceland today, as CCP announced that it has brought on Sean Decker as senior vice president of product development. Decker is a 12-year EA veteran and recently headed the publisher's free-to-play focused games group, along with previously overseeing DICE and EA Los Angeles. EVE Online, as crazy as it sounds, is entering its second decade of being a game about internet spaceships, and CCP is looking toward the future.

The company referenced Decker's extensive industry experience as a valuable asset in helping guide EVE Online through its next 10 years and in ensuring growth through the eventually-maybe launch of World of Darknessand the expansion of DUST 514. Decker will be based out of CCP's Atlanta studio.

Massively's Brendan Drain spoke with Decker and EVE's Hilmar Petursson at a press event yesterday. We'll have more information on how the new hire will impact EVE this afternoon!

EA's DICE studio is the motor that powers several of gaming's most popular franchises. Need for Speed and Battlefield are just two of the enormous series that DICE's Frostbite engine is behind, and EA's pledged the engine's support to many more of its titles. It's with these things in mind that we met up with DICE General Manager Karl Magnus-Troedsson at E3 2013, where we discussed Frostbite 3, Frostbite Go, Battlefield 4 and even a little Mirror's Edge 2 for good measure.

Troedsson had a headline spot during EA's E3 stage briefing, where he helped to narrate a live demo of a 64-player match. Beyond a showcase for Battlefield 4, the presentation was perhaps the most stunning demonstration to date of the DICE studio's Frostbite engine and the power it's able to wield when harnessed by skilled developers. And for the first time ever on next-gen consoles, Battlefield's console versions (at least the next-gen ones) are identical with that of the PC one. Massive online battles and incredible in-game events -- such as a Shanghai skyscraper being brought toppling down, all while naval scraps and helicopter dogfights are taking place -- are possible on both PC and the next-gen boxes from Microsoft and Sony. We discuss all that and more with Troedsson in the video we've dropped just below the break.

At its pre-E3 event today, EA confirmed the Star Wars Battlefront franchise will return. The game is currently being developed by DICE and will use the same Frostbite engine that powers the Battlefield games. EA snagged the exclusive rights to develop Star Wars games after the end of game development at LucasArts, and this is a blend of IP and developer that certainly makes sense. A brief teaser trailer appeared to show off a battle on Hoth, we'll find out more details as they become available. Take a look at the trailer embedded after the break.

Electronic Arts and Disney announced a multi-year agreement today that will see future Star Wars video games exclusively developed and published by EA. This news comes a little over a month after the house of mouse made the decision to stop internal development at LucasArts. EA's developers scheduled to take on the Star Wars universe include DICE (Battlefield), Visceral (Dead Space) and BioWare, the latter of which will continue development of its already released Star Wars MMO (The Old Republic). The financial terms of the agreement have yet to be disclosed, but EA will create games for a "core gaming audience" while Disney will produce casual titles for mobile and social outlets. Now that the force is strong with EA, our fingers are crossed for a new installment in the KOTOR franchise.

This year's Battlefield series entry -- Battlefield 4 -- is headed to PCs this fall. The game wasn't given other platforms, but logic dictates it'll arrive on the PlayStation 4 and Microsoft's Xbox 360 successor. Apparently, since only Sony's next-gen console is a known quantity and Microsoft's staying mum, EA isn't sharing other platforms yet (but hey, it's probably PlayStation 4 and the next Xbox). The game's being built on the latest iteration of DICE's Frostbite engine, though no other details were given about the engine just yet.

Like previous Battlefield entries, EA-owned Swedish game studio DICE is at the helm, and Battlefield 4 remains planted in current times (unlike the pseudo-future of Call of Duty's latest entry, Black Ops 2). A beta for the game will go live some time this fall, and folks who bought last year's Medal of Honor: Warfighter are automatically part of said beta. We'll have more info as EA offers it up, but color us not surprised if Battlefield 4 makes a reprise appearance at Microsoft's still undated Xbox 360 successor unveiling.

Update: EA also released a 17-minute gameplay demo of the game's prologue section, played on a PC. It features a squad of four soldiers on the run from Russian spec-ops militants in the capital of Azerbaijan, Baku. You'll find it just beyond the break.

Update 2: Per a listing on EA's digital store, Battlefield 4 is headed to Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 in addition to the PC. PlayStation 4 is curiously missing, as is mention of Microsoft's next-gen game console.

Game Technologies, the Poland-based company behind the little electronic die that is DICE+, has just announced a $99 developer edition that bundles a transparent-cased model along with its software development kit. As a reminder, the DICE+ is an inch-sized rubberized cube packed with Bluetooth, an accelerometer and a rechargeable battery, with the aim of bringing human interaction to electronic board games and beyond.

We had a look at a demo DICE+ here at the 2013 Game Developers Conference and it looks relatively unchanged from the one we saw at E3 last year. However, the microUSB port is now revealed via a sliding mechanism instead of a pull-out flap, which should result in a more balanced roll. Marketing director David Gatti also told us that the cube's internals have been revamped and simplified for more cost-effective production.

For some reason or another, Valve head Gabe Newell and Bad Robot head J.J. Abrams' DICE 2013 keynote wasn't available via livestream or on Variety's YouTube channel last week. We're guessing it's because they're both such nice gents that they wanted to give everyone else some time in the spotlight first. Good show! That politeness period, however, is now over, as the 20-minute talk on storytelling -- which features examples from both Newell's and Abrams' work, as well as their influences -- went up today on YouTube. We've dropped it below the break for all to see. If you're anxious to get to the part where the two discuss plans to work together on movie and video game projects going forward, we'd suggest skipping to the last five minutes. Or you could read our post about it right here, should the other option be currently implausible from the cubicle you're in.

Heavy Rain development studio Quantic Dream is notorious for long development times. The studio's also notorious for critically-loved games with strong cinematic cores, and games that often look very different from the competition. Part of that is game design, but another major piece of the puzzle is the engines driving those games -- each game that Quantic Dream makes is built in a unique game engine, which is both very expensive and very time-consuming. The studio's founder and lead, David Cage, explained as much to us in an interview at DICE 2013.

"Quantic Dream is a very special company in the sense that we do a lot of things that wouldn't make any sense in any other company. We haven't done any sequels so far, we work on new IPs each time. And we pretty much develop a new engine each time we develop a new game."

But Cage doesn't harbor much love for that last part -- the game engine bit. He says that his studio opted out of the current console generation's game engine of choice (Unreal Engine 3) because, "we work with Sony, [and] we want to create the best technology for the hardware and see how far we can go." As a result, even Cage's latest work (Beyond: Two Souls) is crafted in a new engine -- the same one used to build the Kara demo we saw last March -- intended to show off the PlayStation 3's late-generation graphical and processing chops. Yes, even with the next PlayStation (codenamed "Orbis") waiting in the wings, his second-party Sony studio is still showing off the aging PS3's prowess. Beyond: Two Souls is more than just a showpiece, of course, with Quantic Dream employing actress Ellen Page to motion performance-capture the game's main character, and the same emphasis on storytelling the studio's practiced previously. Still, Cage hopes for a future where technology isn't something he and his studio need be concerned with.

This year's DICE was especially heavy on great speakers, and we're happy to say that a partnership between The Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences and entertainment trade publication Variety means that most of the great speeches were captured for all to see on YouTube. That means everything from Valve head Gabe Newell's speech on his company's next steps in the hardware realm to Microsoft's discussion of the latest, greatest Halo game -- and even a surprise appearance from the recently retired BioWare doctor, Ray Muzyka -- was recorded. We've dropped the available talks just below the break; sadly, the first day's J.J. Abrams / Gabe Newell back-and-forth on storytelling was an in-person exclusive. We'll have a variety of interviews from DICE with many of the speakers seen beyond the break in the coming days -- keep an eye out (or a bookmark here, of course)!

OUYA CEO Julie Uhrman's promising a quick, simple approval process for games on her company's upcoming Android-powered game console, the OUYA. She told us in an interview this week:

"It's similar to mobile: they'll submit their games, and we'll review for intellectual property infringement, and malware, and excessive pornography. But ultimately it's a quick review and you're in the storefront in one capacity or another."

That's not the only mobile model OUYA's following; Urhman already said the OUYA hardware will iterate on an annual basis, similar to the mobile market.

Despite the console's impending March launch to Kickstarter supporters, OUYA's yet to begin reviewing games for its storefront. "We literally just opened the ability for developers to upload their games into the store," Uhrman explained. The review process isn't too far off, however -- she's predicting a "middle-to-end of this month" timeframe. "We're building that right now," she said, when asked who's staffing that approvals process. "We are a start-up like any other start-up, it's just-in-time business."

The first consumer-ready OUYA consoles are planned for a March launch, with availability at retail to follow in June. The $99 console made a big splash on Kickstarter, eventually raising over $8.5 million when the original goal was a meager $950K.

There will be a new OUYA next year, and the year after that, unlike the traditional game console model, where new hardware ships in five- to seven-year generational increments. "Our strategy is very much similar to the mobile strategy," OUYA CEO Julie Uhrman told us in an interview this afternoon, following her DICE 2013 speech. "There will be a new OUYA every year. There will be an OUYA 2 and an OUYA 3," she added. One potentially featuring the recently revealed Tegra 4, perhaps, rather than the Tegra 3 powering the first units? It sure sounds like it. "We'll take advantage of faster, better processors, take advantage of prices falling. So if we can get more than 8GB of Flash in our box, we will," she explained.

But don't fret, nervous game buyer. Uhrman assured us that "all the games will be backward compatible" going forward. When pushed on how this will work, she said, "The games will be tied to you, the gamer," (like Steam is now) rather than tying your game licenses to the hardware you purchased (like, say, Nintendo's Wii U).

The first OUYA, set to launch for Kickstarter backers this March and at retail in June, comes with a quad-core A9 Tegra 3 that's been maxed out to 1.6GHz. Uhrman pointed out that, because of OUYA's home console form factor (which plugs into a wall, rather than relying on a tiny battery), the console will be, "the best Tegra 3 device on the market." It also doesn't hurt that OUYA's working directly with the Tegra 3's manufacturer, NVIDIA. She said that NVIDIA has a group of folks dedicated solely to getting the chip driving the OUYA to run at its highest capacity ever. We'll find out what that means when we get our hands on the console later this year. Should you like to hear more from Julie Uhrman ahead of that launch, she'll be speaking at Engadget's Expand event this March. Grab your tickets right here!